If you ask anyone what makes a blog popular, they’ll say content. No matter how many clever headlines tell you otherwise, content is still king. If your content does not offer value in one way or another, people will simply not visit your site. The two steps to building a successful and popular blog are simply: writing great content and having people talk about it.

Blog’s don’t grow on their own; they grow through people sharing them. By having people “talk about” your content, I simply mean people sharing your content. This could be via word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, or even a link from their own blog. The latter example, surprisingly (or not) is what I’m going to look at today.

What are the most popular posts on the top blogs out there? What are they writing that gets people talking and linking to them? To answer that, I decided to study the most linked to blog posts on four of the most popular blogs in the world and analyse what made them so popular. Based on the findings here, you can apply the results to your own blogging ventures and produce the type of content that you know people respond to. After all, it’s been proven to work for these guys, so why shouldn’t it for you?

ProBlogger

Problogger is the authority website when it comes to blogging, authored by Darren Rowse. Darren has been kind enough to let me write on his site multiple times so I decided to list him first here. With over 5,000 blog posts to choose from, I was curious to see exactly what those top posts were.

1. Blogging Tips for Beginners (Link)
This is a resource post which combines all of the top blog posts on Problogger which offer advice for beginner bloggers. Everyone was a beginner once, and with over 100 million blogs out there, this definitely has mass appeal.

Links: 4,250

Words: 722

Lesson: Have you put together a series of posts that could adequately cover a large interest? If so, consider putting them all in one resource which provides massive value.

2. How To Market Your Blog in 2007 (Link)
A great post that shows the number of ways you can promote your website over the coming year. Interestingly, this was a guest post by a Problogger reader.

Links: 2,550

Words: 2,601

Lesson: Can you create an overall masterplan for your industry and provide them content for the coming year? A years worth of recipes, productivity tips, gadgets to look out for, or whatever is relevant to your niche?

3.Top 5 – Group Writing Project (Link)
One of the most linked to blog posts on Darren’s site happens to be a competition where he is giving away $1,001 to the winner. The idea was that people write a blog post around a “top 5” theme and they would be guaranteed to get a link from Darren himself. I’m sure a vast majority of people taking part also linked to the original post.

Links: 1,780

Words: 1,303

Lesson: Involve your readers as much as possible. You don’t have to get them to blog, but can you get them involved on Twitter, Facebook, or other platforms?

As the title suggests, this is a list post that teaches people how to overcome a dilemma that most bloggers face at one point or another: how to get more comments.

Links: 1,550

Words: 1,178

Lesson: List posts, as you probably know, are one of the most effective ways to get eyeballs on your content due to their quick-read nature. Could you write a list that helps solve a common problem your industry has?

Every blogger wants to gain subscribers but rarely do people look at the possibility of losing subscribers once they have them. This post provides a wealth of information for anyone to combat the issue.

Links: 1,200

Words: 597

Lesson: It looks like Darren has taken what worked for him previously here and once again wrote a list post around an issue that many people in his niche may face. Definitely an angle to consider if you haven’t already. He also involved readers once again so I wouldn’t be surprised if those involved linked to his content.

Copyblogger

Apart from being one of my favourite blogs, Copyblogger has established their authority via Brian Clark to tens of thousands of readers. Self defined as “copywriting tips for online marketing success” Copyblogger certainly delivers its promise with excellent content published on a regular basis.

1. 10 Sure-Fire Headline Forumlas That Work (Link)
Headlines are without a doubt the most important part of a blog post. Here, Brian shares tips to help you create headlines that people are naturally drawn t0.

Links: 2,450

Words: 623

Lesson: Find out what is important to your niche and write a list post which will help them easily provide that to their own audience. If you can allow each person to tailor that to their specific situation as done in Brian’s post with “[blank]” then even better.

2. How to Write Magnetic Headlines (Link)
Again, on the theme of helping people with the most important aspect of blogging, this “how to” guide from Copyblogger shares a list of the sites top posts on the subject collected in one place.

Links: 2,250

Words: 232

Lesson: Work out what is the most important thing to your audience and write a number of posts on the topic. As the icing on the cake, put together one page which collects those posts in one place.

3. How to Attract Links and Increase Traffic (Link)
Yet another resource post of Copyblogger articles on a specific subject. This one looks at quite possibly the most important aspect to growing your blog: getting more links to your content and increasing traffic. The links here aren’t to other Copyblogger posts, however, but to posts by other posts across the web.

Links: 2,170

Words: 518

Lesson: A resource post that includes links to other sites shows you as an authority in your niche and may even gain you links from the websites included.

4. Copywriting 101: An Introduction to Copywriting (Link)
Another great resource by Brian, sharing his top tips on Copywriting. It is unsurprising that Copyblogger shares a resource on this topic, seeing as this is the theme of the site.

Links: 1,810

Words: 425

Lesson: Again Brian shows that putting together a resource of your top posts on one subject can really get people talking (and linking).

5. 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers (Link)
A great list topic on a subject that all bloggers want, more subscribers. Brian shares 10 simple but quick ways to do just that.

Links: 1,110

Words: 878

Lesson: Lists post are always going to be effective. If you can write one on a topic that you know really matters to your blog readers, then it has a good chance of being a hit.

Guy Kawasaki

Guy’s blog, How to Change the World, is perhaps one of the longest running blogs I’ve come across. Guy gives his excellent, unique, and first-hand view on business life as a successful investor and entrepreneur.

1. The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint (Link)
After having sat through what is probably more presentations than anyone reading this combined, Guy shares his thoughts on how presentations should really be done.

Links: 7,780

Words: 627

Lesson: Go against the status-quo and give a new way of working with something you know your audience uses.

2. 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn (Link)
LinkedIn is one of the most popular social networks in the world and is focused around business networking. Guy put together this great post which shows different ways to use the service.

Links: 3,570

Words: 1,155

Lesson: Is there a niche site or service out there that is popular in your industry? If so, write an article on the different ways it can be used to help each of your readers.

In December 08, Twitter was experiencing its first major growth surge as it started to attract people outside of the tech industry. Guy, with over 100,000 followers, shows how he uses Twitter as a tool to market his businesses.

Links: 2,740

Words: 2,225

Lesson: Find a product or a service that is relevant to your industry and write a comprehensive guide on how they can get the most out of it to benefit them directly.

4. How I Built a Web 2.0 Social Media Site for $12,107.09 (Link)
Guy shares a rare insight into how entrepreneurs build businesses online and in this case, his social voting website Truemors. It is great to see so much transparency and especially from someone in the spotlight as much as Guy.

Links: 2,170

Words: 1,121

Lesson: There are few things with more viral potential than a list post, total transparency, and a case study that your audience can really relate to.

5. The Art of the Start Video (Link)
Guy shares a long video which is his guide to entrepreneurship and building successful startups. This received a standing ovation in person, so was also received well online.

Links: 2,050

Words: 147

Lesson: Try offering your best content in a new format. Instead of just transforming text versions to video, try creating something long and compelling that is packed with value.

SEOBook

Authored by my friend Aaron Wall, SEO book is the top resource online about increasing your search engine rankings and getting more website traffic. Not only is Aaron an expert on the subject, but he is also a genuinely nice guy, allowing me to interview him for this website when I was only 16 years old.

1. 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity (Link)
It’s funny to see Brian Clark (Copyblogger) commenting on this excellent link building post by Aaron and Andy when, I assume, he was not a web celeb. This massive resource article shares excellent tips on how to build the most important factor in search engine rankings: backlinks.

Links: 5,570

Words: 3,276

Lesson: Aaron shows that you should find out what matters to your industry and put together a huge resource post on helping them get it. Tie that into a list and you’ve got yourself a winner.

2. The Bloggers Guide to SEO (Link)
Another massive article by Aaron and his Wife Giovanna gives bloggers tips on how they can improve the on-site optimisation of their blogs. Something like this was sorely missing for quite a while in my opinion.

Links: 2,540

Words: 3,501

Lesson: Find a big market and find out how you can give them your expert advice. Could you stamp your knowledge on the blogging, real estate, marketing, or any other niche?

3. New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding (Link)
Aaron goes in-depth on a new Google update showing a lot of figures and ranking reports since the changes. Aaron has been known for breaking content like this since writing about the Google Florida update back in 2003.

Links: 1,609

Words: 1,391

Lesson: Cover breaking news in your industry and provide a more in-depth analysis than anyone else. Then, when other blogs write about the changes, they’ll cite you as their source of information.

4. Track Google Adsense Clicks via Google Analytics (Link)
Here Aaron shares a handy way to find out which visitors are clicking on your ads. From there, you can try to increase the traffic from that source and thus earn more money via Google Adsense.

Links: 981

Words: 349

Lesson: Provide a tool or a way to do something with existing software that has a mass appeal. Webmasters using both Google Adsense and Google Analytics is a huge market.

5. Search Engine Algorithm Comparison (Link)
Although this was written over three years ago, a lot of the advice is both useful today (if less relevant). Another monster guide from Aaron shows the differences between the top search engines and how they rank websites.

Links: 672

Words: 9,334

Lesson: Is there something confusing about your niche that people would like explained better? How about 401 k’s (finance), market trends (real estate), forex (stock trading) or even tyre options (automotive).

3 Key Things I’ve Learned

Hopefully with these 20 examples you have tons of ideas for blog posts in your industry. Although this took me hours to put together (and to find the most linked to blog posts) I believe there is more than enough value in this post to make up for it. Here are three things that really stood out for me while writing and researching this article:

1. Length Matters – What you say is far more important than how much you say, but length does matter (don’t worry, I won’t be putting penis englargement links here). The longest post had 9,334 words while the shortest only had 232. On average, however, the posts had 1,610 words.

I don’t know about you, but the majority of blogs I see don’t put 1,610 words worth of value into their posts. Maybe it’s time to start?

2. Resource Posts Get Links – This actually amazes me, but blog posts that just linked to other blog posts (on the same sites) managed to get thousands of links. Of course it helps if you have an established blog already, but I’m surprised other bloggers are linking to these pages. This is definitely something I’m going to incorporate into my own sites in the future.

3. Show How to Utilise Services – A good majority of these 20 posts were showing people how to utilise services — whether that was social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, or stats programs like Google Analytics. If you can teach people how to get the most out of a service, it seems like they are more than happy to talk about you.

Of course, it would be best to pick something relevant to your niche rather than just the examples posted here.

So, 2,250 words later, I’ll find out if this blogging analysis has helped me write blog posts that get links.

Brilliant you are spot on. I personally don’t like nor do I read some of the blogs you posted because they are popular. I like finding obscure blogs by people that have something to say and not regurgitated content. Granted it may not be that way for most but for me well…Thanks for taking the time to share this analysis. If you ever want to post for us let me know 😉

Thanks for this great analysis Glen, it never seizes to amaze me what kind of information you can find on the internet and this blogpost certainly is a little gem in that respect. Deeplinking within your own blog (or sneezing as Darren puts is) really does help get more views.

Getting an average of more than 1600 words will be my biggest challenge I think, I’m always for “the Tao of the short blogpost” As I put it on my blog or in other words: Make a statement, do it fast and get away with it. Although trends seem to be developing towards longer blogposts these days on almost all blogs I read. It’s seems bloggers are getting more skilled over time and write better, longer and most certainly “deeper” blogposts as time goes on. Going deeper into their their field of interest as their blogs mature.

This is a well-researched and well-thought out piece! really great writing. It has really good tips for struggling bloggers. I look forward to more posts from you that I could actually use and implement. 😀

Totally awesome post, I agree that it is one of the best ones you’ve written 🙂 No lies!
I have so much that I can learn from this, going to start reading all these articles that you linked to here! Thanks so much 🙂

What I notice about most of these posts is that they are ‘pillar’ content. By that I mean, that once written they can easily be referred back to and are easily ‘tagged’ by other blogs.

This is something I try to do on my own blog, as well. For example, I wrote a 4k word post on ‘negotiation’. Now, anytime I reference negotiation, I have a insanely value resource to link back to. In addition, that post makes it easy for others to link back in there content.

Find out what topics you are regularly talking about and concentrate on making a kick-ass post on it. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. 😉

I often refer to it as flagship / pillar content so definitely know what you’re talking about. Something I will be doing with this site soon is writing guides to the top sites like Twitter / Mixx etc so that when I reference them in a post, I will link to that guide.

I might add being aware of trends in your industry and discussing those trends before others on a consistent basis. I noticed that upcoming trends are frequently out there for several years before they really break onto the scene, then everybody is trying to find information on the topic to write their own posts.

Insightful. I’m still amazed about how much link popularity is a key factor in notoriety. Coincidentally, I am running some sort of similar analysis, but not as technical as yours. Would love your opinion on it when it’s ready. Also, congrats for that subtle search engine hook about penis enlargement, these types of SEO optimizations must be learned in school ;-).

As for the length, I also appreciate blog posts which are full of content. The number of words doesn’t always mean good content, though 😉 I guess the point is to differentiate yourself from other posting platforms like twitter or posterous/tumbler when you’re usually posting just bits and pieces. I just checked my wordpress dashboard and found out that my average is 1550 words per post in the last month. Seems I’m on the right track here 🙂

I simply have to put this link on my new writing blog under the topic, resourceful articles for authors. It’s not only for my readers, but also for me to dip back into regularly. This is such a fantastically helpful post. Thanks

The problem with these sites is that they all appeal to people who own or manage a blog or website and are capable of making links. It would be far more interesting to look at travel, sports, politics, or celebrity blogs to see how they get link.

Constantly referring to sites within the same niche really isn’t that instructive.

I know that unusual pictures or things that are simply amazing tend to do well on Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. The reddit community seems to be a huge fan of images so you might want to try getting some leverage there.

What are the most popular posts on the top blogs out there? What are they writing that gets people talking and linking to them? To answer that, I decided to study the most linked to blog posts on four of the most popular blogs in the world and analyse …

I learned some good stuff here and can see you spent a lot of time creating this post. I imagine it will end up on a top 10 someday! Like Gary, I would have found it helpful to see an analysis that included blogs in another niche as well as blogging or seo. I’m kind of a concrete thinker I guess but it would be interesting to me to see how the trends are similar across niches.

Definitely some good tips and insights here. I see one flaw here. These are all essentially “How To” / “Tips and Tricks” types of blogs. By their very nature, they are supposed to be offering the keys to the kingdom.

They’re also not the top 3 blogs, which makes me question why you chose them except to promote friends who might link back to you and help promote your post.

I’d RATHER see you write a second post, but this time look at an industry not revolved around tips, tricks, or how to’s, and evaluate THEIR biggest baddest posts. When your audience isn’t coming to learn how to make their own blogs and websites gain more traffic, what tips are the best bloggers using?

We live in this bubble of Tips based blog communities that probably don’t make up the majority of blogs out there. How do people who talk about REAL human interest topics accomplish the same goals? That’s what I would love to read.

I mean that sincerely. I hope you’ll write it. You’ve got great research skills and an eye for details. I just want someone to break further out of the mold and use a different blog genre as case study fodder.

I did try Link Diagnosis (Free) but that was going to take over 3 hours and I’m not specifically sure it would give me what I was after. Instead, I used the SEOmoz Pro Tools and there is a tool for this in their labs feature. It simply showed me the most linked to blog posts and then I calculated the rest (links + words) manually.

Hi Glen,
You had complied some great link bait articles over here. Learning from this successful example is definitely helpful for us to learn more about creating content that attract links. Great article!

Hey Glen,
Thanks for this meaty post. This not only contains great information on important posts we might have missed but does a great job in laying out steps for bloggers to follow so they can emulate successful bloggers. Extremely helpful.
Appreciate it!
Take Care,
Jill

Wow Glen, you’ve once again given me much to sink my teeth into…can’t wait….And by the way, despite the fact that I’ve never been tech savvy, through the help of your ebook (Cloud Living) I set up my first blog on WordPress today, from start to finish, and even set it up using Thesis. It was literally like you were holding my hand, which was absolutely necessary in my case, but we got ‘er done;-)…thanks for writing a book an average Joe like me can understand.

Hi Glen,
This is a great post pack filled with useful information. I have 4 blogs that I work on diligently to make both relevant and content driven. However, I am more creative than I am technical so I appreciate the tips on how to get my blogs appreciated.

At least now I can implement some of the strategies that you listed, check out your examples and make my blogs a success. I am now expired where I was previously worn.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much packed into one blog post. I’m supposed to go to a Rebarcamp (Real Estate) on blogging and social media. If I hadn’t paid $12 for the lunch I’d be tempted to stay home and work my way through all of the linked articles and be a lot smarter for it. Congratulations.

SEOMoz has had some fascinating posts up lately about some of their most popular articles. The conclusion there was that a healthy mixture of video/audio/images along with text tends to increase greatly the likelihood of getting lots of backlinks. I agree.

Would be good if you went back through the posts you listed here and reported on their use of multiple media formats.

Man, I think I’ve never done a post with over 700 words and thinking of doing it seems just to be impossible for me. Anyways, with this post MAYBE I could start looking into it and use it to my advantage as well.

Oh my, I’ve got a lot to learn. You are so generous in sharing this valuable information for your reader, I think all the information one needs to success in blogging is compiled here. Thank you for this. 🙂

Hey Glen!
That is excellent information … a completely new perspective on how to plan and organize your posts.
Interesting re the length of posts. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a Twitter expert. Her comment was that blogs tend to be too wordy and today’s internet residents only want sound bites. Hmmmm….. there are obviously a lot of different residents in the world of the internet.
Thanks for the insight. best…………valentina

Glen I believe that you are master blogger. As you said I have never seen a blogging analysis like this one. I am an aspiring blogger; I know some of the points which you mentioned and also gained vast knowledge after reading your blog post here. It is best source of information for the beginners who start blogging from scratch. I am very thankful to you for posting such nice information about blogging.

This is a great post. I have just gone to all of these websites and added them to my Google reader. I know I am a bit behind the rest of the world but I have decided to try and keep up to date with some of the top bloggers out there. This is the longest winded post I think I have ever seen but thank you for the energy you put into it.

I just made the decision to jump into Internet Marketing. I have a background in radio and writing copy. Now that radio is automated and satellite fed, our jobs are going away. I have discovered another source of good articles. It’s http://www.IMBYRick.com. He seems to have been at it a long time and has lot’s of good pointers on his site.

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Hi Glen,
I read this post and though “good links to valuable blogging advices, but not that interesting for me though” (at least currently).
I started to read another post and asked myself: Why is this post so popular? When I came across the answer, I had to smile: It’s a resource post on its own! And as you found out, people tend to like them. *g

I think your article demonstrates another important point – writing about a topic and then using outbound links to authority sites – builds the authority of the post itself to readers and greatly enhances the search engine ranking.